We'll be serving tuna melts for 10 bucks fairly soon. These sandwiches will change how you think about tuna. We're so excited about them that we'll be holding a special beer and tuna pairing dinner with the folks from American Tuna and Ballast Point - more info on that to come shortly.

We get the tuna from a small family company based here in San Diego called American Tuna, owned and operated by six fishing families. Last April we talked to Natalie Webster who is a co-owner and the wife of fisherman Jack Webster. We were impressed by their ethics and the quality of their fish, but decided to first explore what our local waters have to offer. San Diego has amazing white sea bass, halibut, yellowtail, swordfish, opah, lobster, sardines, and sea urchin caught just miles from our restaurant off the shores of San Diego.

But American Albacore has been a tantalizing suitor. How so? Despite the long history of San Diego as a tuna town, we found out that more recently it's caught much more by sports fishermen than by commercial fishermen. The Department of Fish and Game frowns (with a big legally binding frown) on buying fish from sports fishermen, so it's nearly impossible for a restaurant to buy local wild tuna.

American Tuna just happens to be a group of fisher-families that have lived for generations in San Diego. They fished through the heydays of San Diego as a tuna town, but stuck to their traditional pole and troll fishing methods. This method is over a hundred years old and was the first commercial method used for catching tuna.

Companies you've heard of like Bumble Bee Tuna and Chicken of the Sea were San Diego companies for decades. Since the late sixties they've moved to foreign flag vessels, owned by foreign companies, and have moved all their processing abroad where canning costs are lower and fishing laws less strict. The quality, as you might imagine, has suffered greatly as the bottom line became more important and the ocean gradually deteriorated to the point were some species of tuna are nearing endangered list status. That is amazing considering tuna are some of the fastest growing species in the ocean and were formerly the most prolific. Most tuna is caught using large nets that encircle a school of tuna, taking the entire school, young and old as well as any other fish in the area. A large part of tuna are also caught using longlines (miles of hooks and line with smaller lines coming off of it), but do not use the methods of longlining which best prevent by-catch. Here's a Greenpeace paper on the topic of tuna fishing methods.

There are a number of reasons why eating American Tuna is better than eating tuna from these companies. First off, these American Albacore Fishermen know exactly how and where all of their fish were caught. The big tuna brands don't. Some of the fish may have been responsibly caught, but some may have been caught in ways that do severe damage to tuna stocks and the stocks of sea turtles, sharks, sea birds, and others. All American Tuna’s albacore is caught with individual hooks and lines... one hook, one fish, one at a time.

Because of this, the Marine Stewardship Council certified the North Pacific Pole and Troll Albacore fishery.

The San Diego fishermen head out to sea in June and follow the schools of albacore that head north to Oregon and Washington. They start catching albacore as they head into Northern California and up into Southern Oregon, but their primary fishing grounds are the waters off Northern Oregon and Washington. They catch their own sardines to use as bait and throw them in the water to draw the younger albacore close to the surface.

Older, larger tuna can accumulate mercury which isn't safe to eat too frequently, say more than once a week. The fish that they catch are 12 to 25 pounds which is pretty much the equivalent of a teenaged albacore... not old enough to accumulate much mercury. American Tuna has testing done on their fish to make sure of this and have found the levels to be very low to untraceable. There is also a very high selenium content in these albacore which counteracts mercury. These smaller surface feeding albacore also have very high levels of omega-3s, 8-10,000 milligrams per 6 ounce serving.

So the fishermen head out for a few days, catch sardines, catch the fish, and then unload in either Oregon or Washington in one of the various ports. The albacore are either brined or blast frozen on board and are not defrosted until they are in the processing facility in Oregon.

The canning is done by Jack and Diana Hampel at their company called Chuck Seafoods. These people know how to can a premium piece of meat. Every fish is hand filleted and every can is hand packed. The big foreign processors bake the fish up to three times before putting it in the can with 35-40% water, adding soy, pyrophosphates, “other fish”, vegetable oil, and other things to bulk it up. The oil from the tuna is drained off and sold somewhere else. In doing so, you also take away a lot of the omega-3 rich tuna oil. Not a good thing. Jack and Diana don't add anything to the 4.16lbs of sashimi grade albacore. They cook the tuna in the can just once, so you get top quality fish packed in its own fish oil. The unused low quality pieces and waste are sold or given away for crab bait.

The process gives the product a fresh, flavorful quality that you can only get from hand processing by people who care about quality. And all this happens in Coos Bay, Oregon... only 100 miles from my home town of Sweet Home, Oregon. Ah, Home, Sweet Home. True, this is 1,000 miles from my new home in San Diego, but as far as the impact on the environment, I'd rather be eating this tuna than most of the food available to me in a regular supermarket.

Some of the canned product is stamped and coded so that it's traceable back to the boat it was caught on. Some of the canned tuna is shipped to high-end restaurants in Manhattan and throughout the east coast. Much of it comes back to San Diego where it is stored in a small warehouse on Main St. and Harbor Drive downtown, and is then personally delivered to restaurants and markets around town. You can find it at Bay Park Fish Co., George's at the Cove, Urban Moe's, Whole Foods, and other places.

Just like the old days, the former tuna capital of the world, San Diego is back in business, but on a small, sustainable scale.

Alexandra Stafford wrote an excellent piece on American Tuna in the Fall 2008 issue of Edible San Diego. Take a read...